If financial services recruitment were a garden, it would now be lying mostly dormant for the winter but with the odd bed of flourishing winter vegetables. The exciting floral displays (M&A jobs, trading jobs, sales jobs) would have died back, but there’d be some healthy growth in less exciting areas like sprouts (compliance) and winter pansies (IT). At the risk of overstretching an already weak metaphor, there’d also be some healthy growth in purple sprouting broccoli (asset management jobs).

In a report out today, recruitment firm Astbury Marsden confirms the picture of a dormant-ish financial services recruitment market in the City of London. New financial services job vacancies in the City were down 12% year-on-year in October 2013 says Astbury Marsden. Banks’ revenues haven’t been strong enough for long enough for them to hire, Astbury Marsden said.

Nonetheless, individual banks like Standard Chartered, HSBC and JPMorgan have been bulking up in compliance and control roles. And Astbury Marsden highlights asset management as a perennial hot spot for finance hiring, claiming that hiring there has been boosted by a rising stock market and increased funds under management. If you want a job elsewhere, you may need to wait until the sun comes out.

Separately, the Sunday Times offered an interesting statistic underscoring the vulnerability of jobs at Goldman Sachs in London to the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union. The paper said that 85% of Goldman’s European staff are based in London, even though only 35% of Goldman’s European revenues relate to the UK. In September, Michael Sherwood and Richard Gnodde, co-chief executives of Goldman Sachs International, warned that “every European bank would be gone in short order” if the UK exited the EU, adding that Goldman would keep trading in London but would disperse other jobs across the European Union.

Last year, Goldman Sachs International employed 5,663 people. If the Times is right, 4,813 of them are currently in London. If Goldman jobs were dispersed according to revenue generation, 2831 positions would move elsewhere in Europe.

“Employees who were promised $4 worked no harder than those who were promised $3. Those who were promised $3 but then later were given an additional $1 worked significantly harder than the other two groups.” (Quartz)